Abstract
Middle-class families in London and New York in 1830, with their comforting editions of the Times and the Morning Courier at hand, had little reason to contemplate the enormous changes that lay ahead. London had emerged from centuries of political and commercial activity in a dominant position, though provincial metropolises, including Manchester and Birmingham, were beginning to rival it as a result of considerable industrial changes under way in Britain. It continued, however, to be the largest city in the world, with a population of almost two million people. Its eight daily newspapers (four of them evening papers with small circulations), led by the Times and the Morning Chronicle, were the only ones of this type published in Britain; elsewhere, newspapers appeared weekly or, occasionally, two or three times a week. London was at the center of the nation’s publishing trade, which featured book distribution, as well as influential weekly magazines like the radical Examiner and the literary Athenaeum. Virtually all news, domestic and international, was filtered through its communications pipeline. It was the chief entrepôt of print, although the majority of its publications were relatively high-priced and beyond the reach of ordinary people.
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Notes
See Louis James, Fiction for the Working Man, 1830–1850: A Study of the Literature Produced for the Working Classes in Early Victorian Urban England (London: Oxford University Press, 1963). For brief histories of 45 publishing companies that helped to shape a popular literary taste in nineteenth-century America, see Madeleine B. Stern (ed.), Publishers for Mass Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century America ( Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980 ).
Richard D. Brown, Knowledge is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Gunther Barth makes the compelling point that the urban press gave a stimulus to cultural change by providing unifying information about the nineteenth-century city. City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980 ). An analogous interpretation–that the rise of a “commercial press” enabled residents of a city to adapt to it more effectively–is presented in William R. Taylor, In Pursuit of Gotham: Culture and Commerce in New York ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1992 ).
Andie Tucher, Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994), maintains that the penny press of the 1830s reflected “the social and economic turmoil of the Jacksonian age (and) the clashing of the interests of the rising classes with those of the entrenched elite” (p. 16).
See Joel H. Wiener, The War of the Unstamped: The Movement to Repeal the British Newspaper Tax, 1830–1836 ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969 )
Patricia Hollis, The Pauper Press: A Study in Working-Class Radicalism of the 1830s ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970 ).
Alexander Saxton, “Problems of Class and Race in the Origins of the Mass Circulation Press,” American Quarterly, XXXVI (1984), 217–18. Between 1834 and 1840, 35 daily newspapers priced at a penny were launched in New York City alone. Barth, City People, 70–1.
Isabelle Lehuu, Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 37. Jeffrey L. Pasley “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), provides an interesting link between parties and printers, who are seen as embodying elements of cultural democratization.
John Wight, Mornings at Bow Street: A Selection of the Most Humorous and Entertaining Reports Which Have Appeared in the Morning Herald (London: Charles Baldwyn, 1824), iv–v.
See James Stanford Bradshaw, “George W. Wisner and the New York Sun,” Journalism History, VI (1979–80), 112, 117–21. Frank M. O’Brien describes Wisner as the “Balzac of the daybreak court.” (Story of “The Sun,” 17.)
William A. Croffut, “Bennett and His Times,” Atlantic Monthly, CXLVII (1931), 203.
Charles Knight, Passages of a Working Life During Half a Century: With a Prelude of Early Reminiscences (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1864), II, 262. A recent study is Valerie Gray, Charles Knight: Educator, Publisher, Writer ( Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006 ).
C. N. Williamson, “Illustrated Journalism in England: Its Development–I,” Magazine of Art, XIII (1890), 297–301
Charles Mackay, Forty Years’ Recollections of Life, Literature, and Public Affairs: From 1830 to 1870 (London: Chapman & Hall, 1877), II, 64–5.
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© 2011 Joel H. Wiener
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Wiener, J.H. (2011). The Beginnings of Sensationalism. In: The Americanization of the British Press, 1830s–1914. Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230347953_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230347953_3
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